Three days went by without a response. Then a full week. I caught myself checking the mailbox twice a day, irritated at how quickly a conflict over somebody else's assumptions had claimed space in the life I had bought to escape that sort of thing. The trail camera kept running, its quiet red indicator blinking through the trees without any interest in whether I was annoyed.
On the following Monday, Roberts called. "We're not going to assume silence means surrender," he said. "I've asked Henderson to confirm what their client intends. He says he's reviewing the underlying documents."
"They told me those documents existed before they sent their first demand."
"Perhaps someone told him the same thing," Roberts replied. "Let him do his job. Meanwhile, keep documenting and don't give anybody a reason to make this about your conduct instead of their evidence."
I went back to the county offices with the surveyor Roberts recommended. Her name was Elena Morales, and she had the easy confidence of someone who preferred a measuring instrument to an argument. She walked the boundary with me one clear morning, carrying a receiver, checking old monuments, and comparing the current gravel surface to the lines in the recorded plat. We stopped where the Pine Ridge spur met my road beneath a stand of young pines.
"The spur comes onto your tract here," she said, marking the location. "It's about a hundred and twenty feet from the recorded line to the main drive. Somebody graded it into the side of the existing road. We'll have to check when that work was done, but the physical connection is definitely inside your parcel."
"Any doubt about the boundary?"
"Surveying isn't a religion," she said, smiling. "I can tell you where the evidence places it and what I will certify. The monuments and historical descriptions agree. That's a good thing."
She noticed the drainage cut beside the spur, where spring rains had carved narrow channels through the exposed gravel. Someone had tried to repair it with a load of coarse stone, but the patch was uneven. She photographed the area, not for courtroom drama, but because the water needed a proper place to go if the connection was ever reconstructed or formally shared.
"This section will wash out if nobody improves the drainage," she told me. "Whatever happens with the lawyers, don't ignore that. You're an engineer. You know that a dispute doesn't stop erosion."
Her comment landed more firmly than I expected. I had been so focused on proving where the road belonged that I had nearly forgotten the responsibilities ownership carried. If it was mine, its condition would eventually be my problem, whether the people driving on it appreciated that or not.
The finished survey arrived eight days later. It placed the original road squarely inside my parcel and showed the later junction crossing the property line without any recorded access instrument appearing in the survey references. Elena was careful to distinguish a physical encroachment from a legal conclusion; she could establish where the pavement and gravel were, but not whether a court might recognize rights arising from past use.